


Revolution Knows no Compromise (Overturn and Destory)

by Adanska



Series: attended by a bodyguard of lies [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers: Autocracy
Genre: Gen, Humanformers, Ladyformers, Pre-War, Rodimus was a better leader way before she became a prime, anarchy and revolution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-14
Updated: 2013-08-14
Packaged: 2017-12-27 10:04:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/977476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adanska/pseuds/Adanska
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The people are terrified, and impotent, and angry. A whole city starves, and no one blinked an optic.</p><p>‘Fine,’ she thought, and wired the streets to blow.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revolution Knows no Compromise (Overturn and Destory)

The people are terrified, and impotent, and angry. A whole city starves, and no one blinked an optic.

‘ _Fine_ ,’ she thought, and wired the streets to blow.

  
  
It was getting worse (it had been getting worse for a while, now). The people she passed looked like walking corpses, starved and starving, a powder keg of anger and injustice and betrayal just waiting to blow. A council sympathiser gets beaten to the ground, swallowed by a small mob that leaves nothing behind; the beings waiting in line for the only kitchen for eighty blocks barely blink, shuffling forward on rail thin legs in the vain hope of a hot meal at the end of a three day wait. She sees what’s left of his body fifty-eight hours later, her skin blistered and burned from making the Autocracy its guns and its tanks for six back to back shifts and four measly ration vouchers that if she’s lucky will get her and her fellow squatters enough food for a mouthful before she has to head back in again and again; he’s strung up on the factory gates, bloated and swelled in the hot sun, the Autobot insignia glowering out from his chest, dower and red.

She spat on him as she passed, her mouth parched and dry. Her eyes burned.

  
  
“They took Hardmap,” Slinger told her, her thin thin fingers cutting so smooth through her red curls, twisting and pulling matted hair into a thick scalp braid, dragging along the shaved sides with every cross, her voice barely above a whisper as they listened to the government’s goons march through the streets. Across the room, Girder moaned, her torn flesh glinting wet in the firelight, her breath wheezing in, wet and crumpled. Hot Rod thought of pillows, of pressing until that sad crumpled chest stopped rising; in the morning, she put her hand to a tepid shoulder, and wondered whether that would’ve been better (they buried her with the others, one of fifteen groups in the waned morning light, last night’s eighteen joining last week’s three hundred and last month’s fourteen hundred and it just keeps climbing and climbing, the government wringing every drop out of them and still demanding more, more, more).

  
  
“We need to do something,” Toolbox hissed, bracing the thick metal sheeting with one brawny shoulder already sizzling under Hot Rod’s hands. “We’re dying by inches; why not take them with us?”

Hot Rod welded the sheeting together and said nothing, her head burned out and pounding, her flame so very small. She hasn’t slept in four days, hadn’t eaten in eight; Slinger was nabbed two nights ago, returned this morning dumped on the floor of Jump Joint, and Hot Rod was just so _tired_ \--

“Come with me,” Toolbox implored, her eyes so bright, Girder’s eyes and Girder’s charming smile ghosting every line.

“Okay.”

  
  
(She watched Toolbox’s head explode in a shower of blood and spark, utter chaos erupting as the fucking cops bust in and busted up, the poor and the weak crushed and dying, and she has the bombs and her skin is _burning_ and she doesn’t stop until she’s fourteen blocks away, her face wet with sweat and blood and brain, and she has the bombs, she _has the bombs_.)

  
  
She stopped going to the factory, driven deep into the Acropolex with all the others, the healthy and the dead alike. She buried the bombs in the streets and the buildings, in the inner sanctum of these oh-so holy ruins and the supports of the factories. She buried them but not alone, every bomb placed with several hands, every hole dug and covered with several arms. ‘We stand together,’ they said, and she realised that somehow, these people became hers, and she didn’t know how she could ever do right. By the time Orion finds them (by the time Orion follows her neon-lit trail), there isn’t a hallway or a room not packed with the dead and the dying, her city all ready for the memorial. _“Your government bleeds us dry, and you wonder why we bomb you, why we drive you from our neighborhoods,”_ she cries, desperate and shaking, her shallow facade of snark and competency fizzling away and leaving just Hot Rod behind, just fucking welder-third class Hot Rod who can’t stop hearing her people gasping and dying all around her, the walls growing red with what might as well be their blood, Slinger bruised and broken but still standing at her side. _“Make it count,”_ she tells Pax, Slinger’s hand gripped so tight in hers, and prays to the gods she never believed in to let her people get out alright (she presses the detonator, leaves over a third of her people behind to burn alive, and she doesn’t even get to see the monster burn, collapsed on her knees dry-heaving on the ground, the smell of cooked flesh and cooked screams seeping into her body and her nightmares, Slinger a paper-frail pressure along her side).

  
  
She saved the cops who fought for her city, saved them despite (or maybe _in_ spite of) Bumblebee’s sneers and jeers, saved them to savor that dumb-struck look on the little soldier girl’s face because right now, she needs all the laughs she could get. She saved them and waded chin deep into the battle field, shooting every bastard who came at her wrong, factions be damned, a rogue party in this four-way war just stubborn enough to keep on fighting. She found the cop--the Prime--in the shell of the Citadel, staring down Megatron and just _jawing_ at her, oblivious to the gun hidden in the rubble, and she jumped in head first to save this woman who couldn’t even save her people, couldn’t even see what was wrong even when it was right before her eyes, jumped in to save her because she was fucking _drawn_ to, and nearly got dead for her trouble (decades, _millenia_ later, she would float through space with metal fused to her skin and her soul, and she would fucking _laugh_ ). She saved her, Megatron got away, and in the end it was still her and what was left of her people hauling the dead out of the Acropolex (sorry, the ‘Metroplex’) to bury them away from the people’s eyes, and she wondered what really changed.


End file.
